Phoning Home: Essays

Caesura—Antwerp, 1938

Caesura—Antwerp, 1938 My grandparents came from remarkably different worlds, yet their relationship thrived for sixty-five years because they agreed about nearly everything. In the first months of their marriage, of course, they’d endured the occasional squabble. My grandfather, whose Orthodox Jewish family had fled Belgium ahead of the Nazis, adjusted slowly to the idea of his wife shopping in short sleeves and slacks, while my secular, Brooklyn-born grandmother saw little benefit from a Sabbath morning squandered at synagogue, but over the years Grandpa Leo’s Judaism lapsed into the High Holiday variety while in return Grandma Lillian tolerated joining him for services at the Jewish Center two days each year. On other matters , no daylight shined between them: they enjoyed the same meals (McDonald’s coffee, fried fish at the Nautilus Diner), 54 Phoning Home embraced the same pastimes (canasta, game shows, peoplewatching at the county mall), voted for the same candidates (always Democrats), and complained of the same in-laws. They strove to outdo each other in both their extreme financial caution and their generosity toward their children and grandchildren . As they grew older, their bodies even shrank at the same rate. However, there was one subject concerning which their styles and philosophies never merged: wristwatches. Grandpa Leo was a jeweler by profession—he’d run his own shop before it went belly-up in the 1950s—and he’d trained in the fine art of setting gemstones and ornamenting precious metals in the bustling workshops of prewar Antwerp. His adolescent friends had been aspiring goldsmiths, engravers , watchmakers; his younger sister, my aunt Paula, apprenticed as a diamond cutter. On his list of heroes, ranking behind only the great Jewish-European triad of Dreyfus and Herzl and Weizmann, towered businessmen such as Max Fischer, who presided over Antwerp’s celebrated jewelry emporiums. So for my grandfather, who could dismantle and reassemble the most intricate timepiece, sporting a fine mechanical watch was a matter of both pride and distinction. That didn’t mean he’d throw away money on a luxury timepiece by Breitling or Cartier, even if he’d been able to afford one, which he couldn’t, but simply that he valued a watch that could be relied on and that did its job with precision. In contrast, my grandmother, accustomed to dipping her swollen arms into clogged washing machines and tins of cake batter, wanted a device that she could damage without regret. To this day she still wears Caesura—Antwerp, 1938 55 the discount model that she purchased years ago at a variety shop; she may be the last living person who regularly replaces a three-dollar battery on a five-dollar analog watch. All this matters, or at least matters to me, because approximately ten years ago, while on vacation in Spain, my grandfather ’s watch stopped abruptly. I was not with Grandpa Leo at the time—I was ensconced at medical school in New York City—yet this minor chronometric setback proved a transformative moment in our relationship. My grandparents had been spending their winters in Torremolinos , on Spain’s Costa del Sol, since the early 1980s; prior to that they’d passed October through March of each year on the Canary Islands, where they’d narrowly missed the Tenerife Airport Disaster of 1977 by a matter of days. What my grandfather enjoyed most about both the Canaries and the Spanish Riviera was the influx of Dutch and Flemish pensioners with whom he could speak in his mother tongue. He’d also strike up conversations with British and French and even German tourists in their native languages. My grandmother, who’d grown up speaking Yiddish, managed to follow the German. In a decade of winters, neither of my grandparents had learned a word of Spanish. Each visit my grandparents stayed at the same hotel, joined the same couples for cards after dinner at the same buffet, and made the same bus excursion to Gibraltar, where they smuggled the same wine and cigars back into Spain for the same English friends. Only this year, while strolling on the boardwalk, my grandfather checked his watch—and found the 56 Phoning Home hands frozen in time. To a man who prized both his time and his timepiece, this proved a more significant frustration than it might have been to the average octogenarian vacationer. Under the circumstances, I imagine, most individuals would...